Large Majority Of Fans Don’t Think Takeover Will Happen This Year

We are trying to get as many votes in as possible in our poll on whether Mike Ashley will be able to sell the club this year.

His initial aim was to sell the club before the end of the year, but it seems he got only one serious bidder in Amanda Staveley and her PCP Capital Partners group and their final bid was £250M cash up front.

The news is that Ashley would accept £300M cash up front, but the talk of a takeover should be in the background now until Newcastle are mathematically safe in the Premier League.

Mike Ashley – does he really want to sell the club?

But fans are not convinced Ashley will sell, and maybe this is just another (third) half-hearted attempt by the owner to sell the club.

But that’s not what’s being reported with Ashley presumably desperate to sell Newcastle and get out of club ownership.

In my view Ashley has no intention of selling our club as long as we are in the premier league, i honestly think the only way he will sell our club is if we get relegated and stay in the championship for a few years, he just uses Newcastle as another branch of sports dirrect to advertise sports dirrect all over the world with the sports dirrect signs plastered all over the ground, lets wake up and smell the coffee, he is a greedy parasite, he has no interest or no desire or ambition to help Newcastle United, its all about him and his tacky sports business, he would sell his own mother to make a profit. HWTL.

Lesh from a couple of posts ago. While I agree with what you say. Will MA spend enough to move us forward? No! 15 million today keeps you in the same position as the previous season. A real quality striker costs 30plus. So loans are our only option under the fat man. I’m afraid we’ll never move forward to he’s gone.

Despite some claims he ain’t makIng money out of us. He’s speculating on an asset. Stay up and that asset will be at peak worth and time to sell

Relegation and he’ll want to build the asset value up again before selling.

People shout about the free advertising for sports direct. For what Newcastle has cost him that’s some of the most expensive advertising going for probably little impact (especially given negative press it’s garnered him). Nobody would intentionally buy a club to advertise their product like that. That is just a by product. A nice (for him) bonus while he speculates.

I think his motivation for a while has been sell when he can get his cash out at a tidy £20m+ profit. That’s also why he’s refusing to spend money. He’s fattening up the books. Cash is king and I suspect our cash flow is pretty healthy.

That cash flow is probably also why he won’t budge on his price. Without it a new owner would have to dig another £30m + (my estimate) into the transfer budget.

I don’t believe Staveley had fully secured her finance at the time of bud.

Will more likely be ones if these silent parties in the background (probably the one still in the data room waiting to see what happens)

Yeah and that’s the thing next year we potentially will be getting a crazy amount of money (and profit) that will be bigger than before what will the excuse be for not spending like the other teams next season?

It will be the same old same old marra, The club should be generating at least 70% more income that is stolen by Mike Ashley, so where other clubs can pay their bills and have plenty left over for transfers, Newcastle need that TV money to help cover the bills with not a lot left over.

What’s the process for him actually being able to take money out of the club? I get that proceeds from outsourcing catering etc can be siphoned to MASH Holdings instead of club accounts, but what then? Surely as a limited company these accounts are transparent enough for people to see if he’s done that. There must be checks and balances in place to ensure shareholders of limited companies can’t just pull cash out whenever they feel like it. Or am I being naive?

If Ashley is really getting together a war chest for a possible relegation it will only come from within the club. His days of putting in his personal money are over despite all the free advertising. And the parachute payment of course. This suggests he takes relegation seriously. TV money in the Champo is almost nonexistent so revenue will be low. And we’ve done nothing to increase commercial revenue. So count on about 90M including parachute payment to run the club. Wages are down I would think from the peak years. It is quite possible to break even but the key is to come right back up and we can no longer count on that with a weak squad and Rafa in all likelihood leaving. It looks a bit grim unless we survive.

They way I understand it, and just from what I’ve read in the past Newcastle only get a small percentage of the income from merchandising, with SD taking the lions share. We also pay SD to store the merchandise so we don’t have to clutter a warehouse with it. SD pay nothing at all for the advertising, because Ashley loaned Newcastle (his own club) money and got the FREE advertising to offset interest on the loan.

But that’s not all of it because, besides the outsourcing for catering etc, all saleable assets were transferred to Mash Holdings for sale with no money from those sales coming to Newcastle United.

Account balances are fairly clear RobLeenio. Any major raid on the club’s revenue would be seen. We can judge it by the total revenue earned and what gets spent to keep the club going. It will just about match up next season if we get relegated but there should be a nice wedge of profit this season.

By all saleable assets are you including player sales firebug? Surely not as the club does need operating revenue to survive. And the gate revenue and commercial advertising revenue should all remain with the club. Is this how you understand it?

If we see a huge revenue from this season but the club only breaks even when club finances are reported then there is something amiss and the club will continue to flounder. But it will never be sold if that turns out to be the case because the squad is worth very little. Why would anyone pay the asking price for a club teetering on the edge of disaster every season? Wit player prices the way they are 100M probably wouldn’t be enough to reach the top 10 in the Prem. Bizarre behavior from a bizarre man.

Firebug, thanks for explaining – but it still doesn’t suggest he can profit personally, just that SD gets the revenue as spare cash to invest where it will. Obviously his shares will become more valuable as a result over time, but in the grand scheme of things our turnover is insignificant to what SD generates.

G2, that’s what I thought – we’d easily spot any direct theft of funds from the club accounts. This hasn’t happened so far during Ashley’s time at the club, as far as I know. The lack of investment must be purely down to the fact the club is not making much money, which is down to horrendous management and the previously mentioned transfer of resources.

If you look at commercial revenue streams over the last 10 years we have averaged about 12M a year. It goes up and down depending on which season with 2 relegation years. So 10 years of revenue is about 120M pounds. Not all of that is advertising. As far as I can tell it’s about 70% so Ashley has had about 80-85M pounds of free advertising over that time.

G2, Makes you sick. Am I right in thinking in thinking he can transfer money to himself and from company to avoid certain taxes like corporate tax etc. So if the club need to get money out to avoid a big tax bill it is paid back to him and bounced back? No expert can anyone advise?

I don’t think that’s possible GPP. HM Revenue is on the lookout for things like that. We are still being investigated for dodging taxes on player sales and incoming though. We just aren’t a good business proposition because the owner has never really run us properly and invested what he earned from the club back into the club. I don’t think any other owner takes millions of pounds a year in free advertising out of his own club. That’s part of the reason we never get any better.

We actually had the highest profit from 2011 to 2015 of all 20 sides, a total of 99M pounds! Spurs came next at 89M. Where did that profit go and look at the difference between us and Spurs now. I’m using the Swiss Ramble as the source of most of this and he’s very, very good at it.

I think if we stay up, Ashley will be more generous, simply because we will have more bucks to play with. As for staying up, we cant even dream of beating teams the way bournemouth did recently and their playing staff is better than ours, but not significantly better. I have said before that Rafa ballsed up in his first season by not attacking teas like sunderland, villa more, when we had better ( but more disaffected ) players. We need to get after our opponents and impose out game plan more, and be more assertive when we get a lead. If Slimani doesn’t work we are goosed, but I think we will make it. Whilst I have criticised rafa at times, he has improved our morale and injury list no end, amongst other stuff, and I think the team believes they will make it.

I thought (not that I’ve ever done it) if the club owe him money and their end of year tax date is on a certain date which means they need to get money out by either spending or returning a directors loan. If they spend it they will get taxed and if they leave it in they will be hit with an even larger tax bill. So if they return the money back to him (which he claims we owe) then for some reason (say we are absolute shit and need some investment) he pays it back. I’m no expert but heard it somewhere. Anyone back that up

Tbf running a football club once run down or newly promoted, takes a fortune, the money won’t be there. But that’s down to the flawed regime. Even alot of big clubs carry debt and most big names of expensive players are bought in instalments. MA will never go down that route so that’s why I say at least if we’re in the championship we can compete on and off the pitch.

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